Broken windows theory and programming

The broken windows theory says that cracking down on petty crime reduces more serious crime. The name comes from the explanation that if a building has a few broken windows, it invites vandals to break more windows and eventually burn down the building. Turned around, this suggests that punishing vandalism could lead to a reduction in violent crime. Rudy Giuliani is perhaps the most visible proponent of the theory. His first initiative as mayor of New York was to go after turnstile jumpers and squeegeemen as a way of reducing crime in city. Crime rates dropped dramatically during his tenure.

Known problems (such as bugs in code, bad process in an organization, poor interfaces, or lame management) that are uncorrected have a debilitating, viral effect that ends up causing even more damage.

I’ll add a couple of my pet peeves to Andy Hunt’s list.

The first is compiler warnings. I can’t understand why some programmers are totally comfortable with their code having dozens of compiler warnings. They’ll say “Oh yeah, I know about that. It’s not a problem.” But then when a warning shows up that is trying to tell them something important, the message gets lost in the noise. My advice: Just fix the code. In very exceptional situations, explicitly turn off the warning.

The second is similar. Many programmers blithely ignore run-time exceptions that are written to an event log. As with compile warnings, they justify that these exceptions are not really a problem. My advice: If it’s not really a problem, then don’t log it. Otherwise, fix it.